Moscow Of The 60s: These are photographs of Moscow found in an album that belonged to Murray Howe. The photographs reflect the city the way it was in the 60s. Enjoy! A Christmas tree in the Kremlin. Central squares. Metropol Movie Theater. A Lenin … Read more...

A green spirit flashed boldly like a stoneInto the lake's depth where mirrors dreamt.Look now how brightly flared the flameWhere previously nestled the dim dark.So heartless you in me awakened sorrowToward the water ghosts you'd demolished.In that flash you wished to resist absenceAbove the abyss that is a festive blue.

It is a literary innovation that will delight London's influx of Russians – and intrigue the intelligence services. Waterstones will open a Russian-language "bookshop" within its flagship Piccadilly store next month.
Russian-speaking assistants will be recruited for the shop, which is the personal passion of Alexander Mamut, the Russian billionaire whose A&NN Group bought the high-street bookseller last year in a £53m deal.
Mr Mamut, who says he enjoys reading high-quality literature in Russian and English, has named the new store "Slova", Russian for "words". It will be housed on the ground floor mezzanine level of the Piccadilly branch and contain almost 5,000 titles.
Slova is expected to become a meeting point for the more literary-minded Russians in the capital. As well as stocking the classics of Russian literature – Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov – it will showcase commercial writers such as Boris Akunin and Polina Dashkova, Russia's…

Largely forgotten today in the music scene, Petrov would probably be considered one of today's leading pianists. His greatest weakness was his lack of many quality performances of popular and "standard" repertoire. However, those who really know great pianist playing are familiar with Petrov's outstanding recording of the orginal version of the Liszt Paganini Etudes. Other breathtaking performances of his include one of the great virtuoso performances recorded - the Saint-Saens Piano Concerto No. 2 - without orchestra. Petrov's recording makes a strong argument that his performance has more excitement and drama than any pianist with orchestra.
This recital from 1988 provides a nice glimpse of some of what made Petrov such a solid pianist and outstanding technician. PIanoReview

Nikolay Khozyainov was born in Blagoveshchensk in Russia. He is studying at Moscow Conservatory under professor Mikhail Voskresensky.

Nikolay is the youngest finalist of the 16th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 2010, awarded with distinction. Loved by public, by critics judged as 'the most mature Chopin interpreter'.

"I am sure that this pianist will soon be known all over the world. Let us hope that we will also have an opportunity to admire Khozyainov's outstanding talent here in Poland." (D. Szwarcman, Ruch Muzyczny, 25/2010).

Although the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) never received the highest literary honour, the Nobel Prize, the veneration she enjoyed during her lifetime as well as her ever increasing posthumous fame have made her one of the luminary figures of modern Europe. Few authors of the past century have been portrayed more often in paintings, sculptures or photographs; few bodies of poetry has been more extensively translated, interpreted, recorded and illustrated; few individuals have featured more in the letters, journals or memoirs of her contemporaries. The extensive biographical chronicles of Lydia Chukovskaya, Emma Gerstein, Mikhail Ardov and other associates have helped create a larger-than-life and almost heroic image of the poet, which has become inseparable from her work.

Anna Akhmatova herself propelled this image to mythical dimensions through the consistent self-stylisation and dramatisation of her own persona. A modern-day Cassandra, she lamented, exhorted, raged. Her vie…

Aleksey Navalny is the most striking political figure to have emerged in Russia in recent years. I would indeed go so far as to say that he is the only genuine politician in Russia today. He provokes a wide range of reactions – enthusiastic, hostile, critical, perplexed.

The evolution of my own views on Navalny is quite typical. At first I had no reservations about approving of him, because his story was so good: a young lawyer who singlehandedly, and using purely legal means, challenged a monstrously corrupt system, and forced it to back off with its tail between its legs. I was then terribly disappointed and alarmed when Navalny took part in a ‘Russian March’. Aha! So was he a nationalist? Or an unscrupulous populist? Or simply muddle-headed? In which case his ever growing popularity could make him dangerous.

So I kept watching this young politician and thinking that we should try to get to the bottom of this phenomenon.

In a chapter of his memoir, Speak, Memory, Nabokov tells of his nocturnal wanderings through St Petersburg. Real darkness and artificial light conspire to make foreign his surroundings. “Solitary street lamps were metamorphosed into sea creatures with prismatic spines”; “various architectural phantoms arose with silent suddenness”; “great, monolithic pillars of polished granite (polished by slaves, repolished by the moon, and rotating smoothly in the polished vacuum of the night) zoomed above us.” The whole scale is recalibrated, all perspective redrawn, but the young Nabokov laps it up, feeling “a cold thrill” and “Lilliputian awe” as he stops to contemplate “new colossal visions” rising up before him. He is thrown by these hall-of-mirrors distortions but not entirely surprised to be so—after all, he is in “the world’s most gaunt and enigmatic city.”

This was 1915 and Nabokov was not the only writer to consider the city enigmatic. One year later, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg was published…

The bread is poisoned, air is sipped up:It’s hard to tend to open wounds!Poor Joseph being sold to EgyptWould feel less wretched in his bonds.Under pitch-dark star-studded heavensAstride the horses with eyes shutThe Bedouins make fiery balladsOf steps recalled from daily rut.Mundane events feed inspiration:A quiver lost among vast sands,A stallion bartered – the occasionsAs foggy muddiness disband.And if intense and earnest singing Expands one’s breast and fills the heart,All vanish – there reign supremely The stars, the distance and the bard!

Commenting on recent protests in Russia, award-winning novelist Mikhail Shishkin is rather pessimistic. He compares the country to “a metro train that travels from one end of a tunnel to the other – from order-dictatorship to anarchy-democracy, and back again.” Shishkin’s own novels transcend the narrowly political, exploring instead the underlying human narratives of history. His works are in every sense long overdue for translation, and the time is finally here: Shishkin is the only novelist to have won the Russian Booker, Big Book and National Bestseller awards, as well as a legion of other prestigious prizes, and yet his work remains almost unknown in the English-speaking world.
Shishkin has been compared to numerous great writers, including Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce. He laughs at critics’ need to find literary similarities, but admits that Chekhov has been influential, along with Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Bunin, from whom Shishkin said he learned not to compromis…

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In conversations with Svetlana Alexievich, it quickly becomes apparent that she is more comfortable listening than she is talking. That’s hardly surprising: the Belarusian writer has spent decades in listening mode. Alexievich, now 69, put in thousands of hours with her tape recorder across the lands of the former Soviet Union, collecting and collating stories from ordinary people. She wove those tales into elegant books of such power and insight, that in 2015 she received the Nobel prize for literature.

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When I meet her in a cosy basement café in her home city of Minsk, the entrance nestled in an amphitheatre of imposing, late-So…

History is a battleground, perennially fought over, endlessly contested. Nowhere does this aphorism hold true more than in Russia. A majority of Russians recently voted Joseph Stalin the “most outstanding person” in world history (followed, naturally, by current President Vladimir Putin). No longer the monster of the gulags and purges that killed millions, Stalin now looms in the national consciousness as the giant who defeated the Nazis in World War II. Meanwhile, not only has Russia annexed Crimea and destabilized Ukraine’s eastern regions, its military adventurism has also extended to Syria. Putin, who once described the collapse of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century, looks determined to avenge the humiliations of Russia’s post-Soviet implosion. Integral to this endeavor is not just to flex the country’s geopolitical might in the present but to re-write its past.

It is this point that makes the historiography of the USSR—a subject worthy of …

One of the most revealing episodes in J. A. E. Curtis’s Mikhail Bulgakov, in the Reaktion Books Critical Lives series, itself concerns the writing of a “critical life”. In 1932–3, Bulgakov, a man devoted to the theatre, wrote a brief novelized biography of Molière. The book was commissioned for the hallowed Russian series Lives of Remarkable People, but like much of Bulgakov’s work from the 1920s and 30s, it would not see the light of day until decades after his death in 1940. As usual, the Soviet author had taken a thoroughly un-Soviet approach to the topic, presenting Molière as an individual genius – rather than as a product of his era and class – and fitting the facts of his life into a fictional frame. In his rejection, the series editor explained Bulgakov’s error: “You have placed between Molière and the reader some sort of imaginary storyteller. If, instead of this casual young man in an old-fashioned coat, who from time to time lights or puts out the candles, you had given us …